Creative Sovereignty: The In-Between Space: Indigenous Sovereignties in Creative and Comparative Perspective

The purpose of reviewing Indigenous sovereignties here is not to give an expansive account of either the vast literature exploring the concept or its manifestations in communities and on the ground. Such a task would involve significant time with various communities to capture an appreciation of how Indigenous people articulate and practice sovereignty (a useful effort, no doubt, but a project for another time). We also ask for forgiveness in bracketing stories and lived experience and focus our attention, rather, on recent literature. Despite these limitations, we find significance in covering multiple contemporary iterations of how Indigenous sovereignty has been expressed, imagined, as well as how it challenges settler sovereignties.

Sovereignty is defined in a conventional sense as the exclusive and supreme authority within a defined territory (Jackson, 2007), also referred to as Westphalian sovereignty in reference to a series of 1648 treaties signed in the northwestern German region of Westphalia. Further, scholars of International Relations and law suggest the current global order is structured upon an anarchical system of sovereign states that are independent and equal. In response, others have argued that sovereignty is in decline or damaged, as evident by multi-state configurations like the European Union and the rise of globalization which has seen significant power move to multi-national corporations (Robinson, 2004). Sheryl Lightfoot (2016) has argued the global Indigenous rights movement is subtly changing global politics by articulating a definition of self-determination by peoples that does not necessarily manifest in the creation of a territorially defined, independent state.

We identify Robert Warrior (1994) through his work on intellectual sovereignty, as beginning the tradition of using a descriptor to articulate the distinctiveness of Indigenous sovereignty. While Vine Deloria (1969) used terms like tribal sovereignty, we see the creative work of scholars within the tradition of Indigenous literary Nationalism as cementing this practice. For Warrior (1994, p. 1), ‘The process of sovereignty provides a way of envisioning the intellectual work we [Indigenous peoples] do’. Instead of academic debates focused on ‘identity’ and ‘authenticity’, debates that work to constrain and limit Native thought, Warrior (1994, p. xix) suggests that practice of intellectual sovereignty should encourage engagement of the ‘myriad [of] critical issues critical to an Indian future’. Similarly, Scott Lyons (2010, pp. 449-450) puts forward the concept of rhetorical sovereignty, or the ‘inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit’, as a means to ‘revive not our past, but our possibilities’. For both Warrior and Lyons, sovereignty acted as a productive space for contesting identity- and racial-based Indigenous constructions of knowledge and practice.

The past twenty years we have witnessed a rising and sustained production of literature that investigates Indigenous sovereignties. Paradoxically, the increasing attention on sovereignty begins with Taiaiake Alfred’s widely circulated call for Indigenous peoples to discard the concept altogether. The original critique by Alfred (1999) occurs in Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto and was expanded upon in his article entitled ‘Sovereignty’.

For a historiography of Indigenous sovereignties, Alfred’s chapter “Sovereignty” (2002, 2005) contains a useful literature review of research on Indigenous sovereignties to that point and time.

Though this critique of sovereignty provides an important diagnostic, interestingly enough, it has been met with two decades of substantial intellectual production on Indigenous sovereignty. This is despite the central place Alfred’s critique occupies within the literature (Barker, 2005). The rise of scholarship on Indigenous sovereignty might appear as an indication that Alfred’s critique was rejected, especially given how Alfred has recently been scrutinized for how he, as described in his own words, ‘embodied toxic masculinity and how I did wrong and harmed people’ (Creszenci, 2019). However, Indigenous scholarship on sovereignty is not an embrace of the concept but represents creative attempts to modify, shift and speak back to conventional understandings of sovereignty.

We focus on 15 single author books in the last 15 years that conceptually expand our understanding of Indigenous peoples and sovereignty in significant ways (Bruyneel, 2007; Cattelino, 2008; Ford, 2010; Raheja, 2010; Rifkin, 2012; Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2014; Deer, 2015; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Carlson, 2016; Duarte, 2017; Rifkin, 2017; Nadasdy, 2017; Kauanui, 2018; Nichols, 2020).

This does not include important edited volumes such as Joanne Barker’s (2017) Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies; J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s (2018b) Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders; and Lloyd L. Lee’s (2017) Navajo Sovereignty: Understandings and Visions of the Dine People.

We focus on these manuscripts, as opposed to edited volumes and articles, because they each put forward a distinct treatment of the concept of sovereignty. These books lean heavily toward empirical studies that demonstrate the qualified nature of settler sovereignty and its corollary, how settler sovereignty circumscribes Indigenous sovereignty. Each work has a unique investigation or conceptualization of sovereignty, including (to name a few more) third space of sovereignty, white patriarchal sovereignty, and sovereignty of the soul (Bruyneel, 2007; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Deer, 2015).

Though these works avoid discrete categorization, it is worth pointing out some broad themes, of which we identify three groupings. The first group we identify explores how settler sovereignty exercises coercive control over Indigenous life, or what might simply be described as: sovereignty as colonial. While settler authorities do exercise violent coercion, these works do an excellent job of showing how settler sovereignties are productive. That is, they seek to rewrite and influence operations of Indigenous sovereignties to better conform with settler frameworks.

The second set of studies focus on how these two sovereignties constrain each other, albeit in dramatically different ways. In particular, settler sovereignty is unable to live up to ideal forms of exclusive supreme jurisdiction over a defined territory (in spite of being some of the more ‘powerful’ nation-states in the global system). Even if settler sovereignty is qualified, it continues to constrain Indigenous sovereignty in a host of ways. A paradigmatic example here is Kevin Bruyneel’s (2007) exploration of competing sovereignties of Indigenous peoples and the U.S. state. For Bruyneel, Indigenous peoples exist in a third space of sovereignty that resides neither wholly inside nor wholly outside the U.S. political system. Instead, Indigenous peoples exist on its boundaries, exposing both the practices and limitations of American colonial rule. This colonial navigation compels ‘indigenous political actors [to] work across American spatial and temporal boundaries’ (Bruyneel, 2007, p. xvii). In sum, these works deal with, in the formulation of Audra Simpson (2014), the enormous tension produced by unending discord between settler and Indigenous sovereignties.

Finally, we present a third group of works that focus on Indigenous configurations of sovereignties, acting as an invitation for new envisioned futures. These studies focus on Indigenous peoples’ ongoing practices and ways of imagining a different future. For example, Mark Rifkin (2012) suggests that focusing on Indigenous erotics provides a space to develop alternative visions of sovereignty and peoplehood. Popular representations of Indigenous erotics create a productive space in which to ‘challenge the obviousness of models and mappings inherited from and imposed by the United States’ (Rifkin, 2012, p. 4). While there is a sizable group of books on Indigenous configurations of sovereignty, academia in many ways may be hard pressed in keeping up with the various expressions of Indigenous sovereignty that are regularly invoked today. For instance, in the period of preparing this introduction, we saw declarations and events around representational, plant, structuring and knowledge sovereignty, as well as the creation of a television show (Sovereign by Ava DuVernay and Bird Runningwater) and an Indigenous clothing line (Sovereign by Urban Native Era) focused on various aspects of sovereignty.

Starting with the first two groupings—those that point to the coercive and constraining nature of settler sovereignty—what’s important in these works is how they painstakingly demonstrate settler states’ inability to exercise their full sovereignty (in the conventional sense of supreme indivisible authority) as a result of constraints put forward by Indigenous sovereignty. These are not primarily normative studies, or what sovereignty should be, but rather, they show what sovereignty is. Presumptively, however, normative concerns over what should be are never far from mind, since these authors are clearly interested in demonstrating the injustice of settler sovereignties.

Five books hash out the controlling and coercive nature of settler sovereignty. Starting with a defining work, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s (2015, p. xi) White Possessive focuses on the ‘possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty’. These logics are codified through discourses and conventions about ownership and the nation, illustrating ‘inextricable connections between white possessive logics, race, and the founding of nation-states’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. xiii). The subjugation of Indigenous sovereignty, therefore, becomes an extension of perpetual Indigenous dispossession and reaffirmation of settler ownership and control. Moreton-Robinson asserts that this disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty (as well as its attendant racism and exclusion) is materially and discursively linked through settler historical and political constructions of possession.

Lisa Ford, in her 2010 work Settler Sovereignty, produces an outstanding comparative historical study of how settler sovereignty is able to consolidate itself in the American Southwest and Southwest Australia. Ford puts forward an important conceptual frame for how we can track the rise of settler sovereignty over a territory. It is not merely the presence of settlers or settler authority, but rather it is the criminalization of violence within Indigenous communities that marks the consolidation of settler rule in an area, a practice that has to continue in the present through the denial of Indigenous legal orders (Denis, 1997).

Glen Coulthard (2014) describes the process of settler colonization arriving in Denendeh (NWT) in his book Red Skin, White Masks. Here, settler colonization did not arrive until at least the 1960s and even then was slow to take hold. Coulthard illustrates how within negotiations between the Dene and Canadian government, Canadian authorities were unwilling to budge on two key pillars: the supremacy of Canadian sovereignty over Indigenous sovereignties and capitalist modes of production. Coulthard (2014, p. 151) uses the shorthand, colonial sovereignty to describe these two pillars, suggesting, ‘State sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority’. Coulthard suggests that within this highly asymmetrical field of power, the ability of Canada to override these requirements has a productive effect on Indigenous subjectivities. Over time, Indigenous peoples come to slowly identify themselves with Canadian nationalism and capitalist modes of production (Coulthard, 2008; 2014).

The book Reconciliation without Recollection? was released while we were writing this article. Similar to the above, Joshua B.D. Nichols details the shaky ground of crown sovereignty in Canada, arguing that Section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act of 1982 called on Canada to legally reconcile two sovereignties with their own distinct sources, Crown and Indigenous. But in attempting to do so, Canadian courts have only created a bewildering ‘labyrinthine [of] corridors’ as the judiciary attempts to reconcile the independent sovereignties without discarding the presumption that the Canadian state already has an unlimited sovereignty over Indigenous peoples (Nichols, 2020, p. 15). In Nichols’ (2020, p. 16) summation, ‘In other words, this framework presupposes the very sovereignty that it is supposed to be reconciling’.

Finally, looking at the productive nature of settler sovereignties on Indigenous sovereignties, Rifkin (2017), in his work Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, argues that settler constructions of time has a significant impact on Indigenous life. Producing its own temporal formations, settler colonialism creates ‘particular ways of apprehending time, and the state’s policies, mappings, and imperatives generate the frame of reference (such as plotting events with respect to their place in national history and seeing change in terms of forms of American progress)’ (Rifkin, 2017, p. 2). The lack of interrogation of settler temporal formations, therefore, acts to ‘normalize non-native presence, privilege, and power’, (Rifkin, 2017, p. 13). The imposition of settler time denies Indigenous temporal sovereignty in ways that fall short of full integration, as well as complete erasure. Rifkin points to the subsuming effect of settler sovereignty, constructing convenient frameworks of how society thinks about progress narratives, contemporaneity, and change. It constitutes understandings of norms and even what is considered ‘common sense’ (Rifkin, 2014).

Five works illustrate how Indigenous and settler sovereignties are locked in a perpetual tension where they both constrain and produce the other. Related to this is the aforementioned work by Audra Simpson (2014) on ‘nested sovereignty’. Jessica R. Cattelino’s (2008) High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty acts as a well situated segue to shift attention to books that focus on the tensions between Indigenous and settler sovereignties.

Cattelino looks at Florida Seminole gaming and how tribal ownership and operation of casinos provide economic resources necessary to exercise sovereignty. However, once economic power is exercised, the legitimacy of that sovereignty is brought into question. Cattelino (2008, p. 100) states, ‘American Indians enjoy political autonomy under conditions of economic dependency, but indigenous economic power undermines their political status’. Cattelino (2010, p. 8) puts forward the term ‘double bind of sovereignty’ to convey these tensions arising from Indigenous economic success, suggesting a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario—when Indigenous political sovereignty compels participation in modernity, it often results in ‘accusations that they are not culturally “different enough”’. Simply, even when Indigenous peoples gain economic and political power, settler states and societies impose an assumption that Indigenous sovereignty is only legitimate if Indigenous nations are impoverished and pre-modern.

The double-bind of sovereignty parallels Patrick Wolfe’s (1999) work on repressive authenticity. Here, Indigenous distinctiveness both buttresses Indigenous claims to sovereignty but is also used by settler society to undermine those same claims. The standards of cultural authenticity that settlers impose on Indigenous peoples to gain legitimacy are so stringent that Indigenous cultural difference traps Indigenous nations in a straitjacket. The works of Paige Raibmon (2005), Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast, and Elizabeth Povinelli (2002), Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, also detail dynamics similar to the straitjacket of repressive authenticity.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s (2018a) book Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty also explores how settler colonization creates a lose-lose situation for Indigenous Hawaiians. Kauanui provides a vivid portrait of how Hawaiian elites in the early and mid-19th Century reconfigured the Hawaiian society in order to mimic European social and political norms in the hopes of creating conditions for the recognition of Hawaiian sovereignty by the International system, a system that consisted exclusively of European states. Kauanui demonstrates how Hawaiians paid particular attention to reworking their legal orders to reflect European norms of sexuality and gender. For Kauanui (2018a, p. 21), ‘The move to independence for the nation requires the subordination of women and the oppressive revision of sexual customs—at least in its current juridical straitjacket, which enabled Hawaiians to be seen as modern subjects in the first place’.

Moving to a northern context, Paul Nadasdy’s (2017) work Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formations in the Yukon looks at the concept of sovereignty within the context of Indigenous peoples of the Yukon implementing self-government agreements with the Canadian government—or as Nadasdy describes it in the title of his book, ‘First Nation State Formation’. Here, Nadasdy is concerned with sovereignty and its entailments: territory, citizenship, nation, and time. Nadasdy draws his observations from being asked to work for and sometimes represent Kluane First Nation within self-government processes. From these experiences, Nadasdy argues that Indigenous governments have far more pressure to conform to the precepts of Western sovereignty in order to be recognized by the Canadian state than the ability to mold new governing institutions to conform to Indigenous understandings of power and authority. Sovereignty, therefore, acts as a precondition for politics, making ‘any effort by indigenous people to engage with settler state officials in the political arena requires them to conform to the cultural entailments of sovereignty—a set of assumptions about the nature of space, time, knowledge, and sociality that is intimately bound up with the state form—or risk not being heard at all’ (Nadasdy, 2017, pp. 3-4). So while the Canadian governments do reform the federal order to accommodate Indigenous governments, the process of First Nation state formation profoundly transforms the way Indigenous peoples think and act in the world. Nadasdy’s work is an excellent illustration of Leanne Simpson’s (2016, p. 29) well-circulated phrase that when Indigenous peoples try to change the state, ‘the settler-colonial political system changes you more than you can change it’.

The third grouping of works that draw upon Indigenous insights and lived experience emphasize Indigenous configurations and focus on the contents of Indigenous sovereignty. Each, in their own way, envisions new futures for Indigenous peoples. Duarte’s (2017, p. 37) work on Network sovereignty, discussed earlier, examines how Indigenous peoples engage with information and communication technologies in ways that are subject to colonization but also create forms of Indigenous sovereignty. To do so, Duarte must skillfully uphold and critique tribal sovereignty—the particular form of sovereignty held by tribal governments. Against a backdrop of tribal sovereignty and the wider efforts of Indigenous peoples to maintain relationships, Duarte shows how Indigenous control over communication infrastructure intertwines with Indigenous philosophies of communication and understandings in ways that helps to maintain the strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples.

Jessica Deer (2015), in her book on sexual violence against Indigenous women, theorizes a ‘sovereignty of the soul’. Deer outlines how sexual violence is so deeply embedded in the colonization of Indigenous peoples that work aimed at achieving sovereignty must include a strong response to rape and the self-determination of survivors of gender-based violence. ‘Self-determination for individual survivors and self-determination for tribal nations are closely connected’, asserts Deer (2015, p. xvi), continuing, ‘It is impossible to have a truly self-determining nation when its members have been denied self-determination over their own bodies’. Thus, sovereignty of the soul is a call to pay attention to the traumatic impacts violence has on individuals and calls on Indigenous nations to both prevent and heal trauma. Sovereignty of the soul is an invocation that the collective sovereignty of Indigenous nations is dependent on the bodily sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.

Turning to creative expressions, Michelle Raheja (2010, p. 194) explores the notion of visual sovereignty as a way to open space for video, film, and new media as a ‘creative act of self-representation that has the potential to both undermine stereotypes of Indigenous peoples’. Artists, through the distinctly unique medium of new media technologies, are able to capture individual and community articulations of self-representation and sovereignty and present them back to communities in ways not possible through conventional political channels.

Also see related text on creative theater performances of sovereignty by Julie Burelle (2018) entitled Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performance of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec.

In Imagining Sovereignty, David J. Carlson (2016) calls for a discursive intervention that situates sovereignty in a way to motivate radical decolonial praxis. Carlson (2016, p. 7) suggests that sovereignty is a ‘threshold concept’ that holds significance because it ‘represents a vital, evolving point of contact between colonizer and the colonized’. The historical instability of the term, in fact, makes it a productive front for contestation. Carlson (2016, p. 8) suggests, ‘Sovereignty transforms over time by being brought into relation with new ideas (like the “nation”) or by being deployed in new contexts (like settler colonialism)’. Calling on what he refers to as ‘word warriors’, Carlson points to the potential for dialectic change in colonial structures through engaging this threshold concept. These five works (Deer, 2015; Rifkin, 2012; Raheja, 2010; Carlson, 2016; Duarte, 2017) emphasize the ways new configurations of sovereignty respond to the challenges facing Indigenous peoples.

These three groupings—sovereignty as colonial, settler and Indigenous sovereignties constrain each other, and an emphasis on Indigenous configurations (see Figure 1)—point to how we broadly characterize the proliferation of engagements with sovereignty since Alfred’s 1999 call for Indigenous peoples to avoid the concept of sovereignty altogether. As we see, these 15 texts point to how Indigenous sovereignties occupy the in-between space of what is and what is possible.

Figure 1

These introductory remarks offer three conceptualizations of creativity: (1) as a means, (2) conceptually, and (3) as a bringing something into being. This framing allows for a creative understanding of sovereignty that moves beyond a conventional understanding of Westphalian sovereignty towards new envisioned futures. Creativity as a means points to the way we express our lived-experience in the world. This form of creativity engages the body, as well as other material modes of expression. Secondly, conceptual creativity requires the involvement of the intellect and imagination to recast social structures and their possibilities. ‘Imagination enables people to rise above their own circumstances’, explains Linda T. Smith (2012, p. 263), ‘To dream new visions and to hold on to old ones’. It allows you to think outside the box, to analyze bodily, material realities and think about differing arrangements. As Lyons (2000, p. 449) asserts, ‘The pursuit of sovereignty is an attempt to revive not our past, but our possibilities’. Conceptual creativity requires finding solutions to old problems, to analyze and transform systems that bind and constrict.

Finally, thinking about the spiritual components to creativity requires looking at the root word create, from the Latin term creo or creatio, meaning creation from nothing or bringing into being. Creative expressions have long been viewed in many Indigenous communities as reflections of spiritual realities of the great unknown (Wildcat, 2010, pp. 54-60). ‘The project of creating is not just about the artistic endeavours of individuals’, Smith (2012, p. 263) suggests, ‘but about the spirit of creating that indigenous communities have exercised over thousands of years’.

We try to avoid essentializing or romanticizing Indigenous spirituality, avoiding limitations of secular conventions common within academic threads. We move into this tension because we know Indigenous lived-experiences of sovereignty are more than just political or material.

These three conceptualizations of creativity are not mutually exclusive but, rather, they are dependent and embedded within each other. It is precisely when they are paired, combined, and woven together as one, when the full potentiality of the concept comes to fruition. Taking care not to overextend the braid analogy, we also offer that the above mapping of three types of Indigenous engagements of sovereignty lays nicely onto our understanding of creativity. Each grouping involves some aspect of bodily engagements (whether coercive or constraining), the requiring of problem-solving and thinking outside-of-the-box and are also working to bring new forms into being. They engage the body, the mind, and the spirit.

You may ask why we have paired creativity with sovereignty? We feel it brings something new into the conversation by allowing room for the multitude of ways Indigenous peoples critique, experience, and enact sovereignty. Creativity, as we see it, provides a scaffolding or housing in which to comprehend Indigenous engagements with sovereignty, to explore the in-between space, and to think against and beyond settler sovereignty. We also see it as a simple roadmap for our own thinking about ways our research encounters settler sovereignty—to describe how it operates to control, to reconfigure or constrain each other, or to offer new envisioned futures of sovereignty. Though we sketch three distinct groupings of creativity and sovereignty, all of these treatments supplement and rely upon each other, weaving together a complex understanding of how various experiences and understandings of Indigenous sovereignties occupy the space in-between.

This special issue explores various dimensions of Indigenous sovereignty through a multitude of approaches, drawing upon scholars and artists throughout North America. We hope that the following four articles, five including this introduction, two notes from the field, and two creative pieces provide a glimpse of various ways to envision creative sovereignty in practice.

Blaire Topash-Caldwell in her article ‘Sovereign Futures in Neshnabé Speculative Fiction’ explores how Indigenous science fiction is not just a leisurely activity, but rather a creative approach to sovereignty. Topash-Caldwell explores the Neshnabé oral tradition character of Weetigo and how it can be seen as a metaphor to describe the settler colonial state. Weetigo, a cannibal creature, consumes (much like the settler state) Indigenous bodies, knowledges, resources, and spirits.

Sierra Edd, in ‘Radical Traversals’, explores Indigenous sound artists and complicates notions of time and space. Engaging music and sound studies, as well as Indigenous studies, Edd puts forward a method of close listening that homes in on the notion of traveling indigeneity and unsettles colonial logic through sonic expressions.

In ‘Creative Sovereignties and Fiscal Relations: How “A New Fiscal Relationship” Between Canada and First Nations Might Take Treaty 6 Seriously’, Javed L. Sommers explores what fiscal arrangements between Indigenous nations and Canada might look like if Treaty Six were to be taken seriously. Sommers works from the premise that the signing of Treaty Six between Indigenous peoples and the British Crown is what gives Canada legitimacy to lawfully exist as a state in central Alberta and Saskatchewan, but this agreement does not substantially shape fiscal agreements between Indigenous Nations and Canadian governments today. Sommers makes six suggestions for how treaty six could be implemented today. Three straightforward and three that would require significant divergence from existing practices.

Justin de Leon in ‘Preserving Values: Militarization and Powwows’, ethnographically explores the presence of militarization in Lakota powwows, suggesting that these markers associated with warriorhood are less about traditional explanations of military service and more about savvy navigations of suppressive colonial oppression. De Leon suggests that the transferring and adapting of traditional practices of bravery and warriorhood into practices deemed ‘colonially-approved’, represents a creative approach to maintaining cultural practices and sovereignty.

This special issue contains two notes from the field and two creative pieces. Kelsey Wrightson explores her experience as a white Settler of lived expressions of sovereignty in her field note ‘Generative Refusal: Creative Practice and Relational Indigenous Sovereignty’. Drawing upon experiences as the Director of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Yellowknife, Canada, Wrightson shows how an innocuous gift of bear hide mitts led her to explore lived expressions of sovereignty and cultural learning. Wrightson puts together a powerful piece that speaks to other forms of sovereignty, as well as the importance of critical reflexivity (and refusability). Matthew Wildcat puts forward a summary of his dissertation ‘Replacing Exclusive Sovereignty with a Relational Sovereignty’. These notes are the opening remarks to his defense. Here, Wildcat argues that one of the primary effects of settler colonization on Indigenous political orders has been the rise of an exclusive sovereignty, where First Nations imagine their authority as discreet and bounded. Wildcat explains how the work of the Maskwacis Education was able to replace practices of exclusive sovereignty with a relational sovereignty where four Nations created a shared jurisdiction to create a Cree education system.

In ‘Extraction: Seeking Ways to Survive’, Tanaya Winder shares and reflects upon her poem Extraction, an intergenerational conversation between a young girl and her grandmother. Reliving multiple ills brought upon Native communities—genocide, boarding schools, and missing and murdered Indigenous women—Winder asks, ‘Can we un-suicide, un-pipeline, un-disappear our dear ones?’ Grandmother teaches granddaughter to knit while softly sharing the ways of the past, engaging the audience to think beyond colonial violences through an intimate moment of learning and connection. We are reminded by Winder, ‘There is no word for undo but many ways to say return’.

In ‘The Deer with 3: Expressing Indigeneity Through Experimental Hip Hop’, musician Talon Ducheneaux shares thoughts about a recent song The Deer with 3 from his newest album Mastincala, which is Lakota for rabbit. Ducheneaux blends genres in his piece, engaging and drawing upon apocalyptic film, Indigenous relations with the natural world, and even cathartic creative expressions of healing.

We suggest a relational approach is at the core of Indigenous knowledge creation, touched upon by almost all of the works outlined throughout this introduction. Knowledge and learning does not take place in a vacuum, rather, it comes from our relationships with our communities, family, friends, as well as other scholars and pieces of literature. It comes from our lived-experiences and interactions with the natural world. This recognition is at the center of how we view epistemology and motivated us to be intentional about our relational approach to crafting this special issue.

We fashioned our editing and writing processes to not only create an environment productive of meaningful scholarship, but also to put forward an academic production model that we want to be a part of. This includes more common practices, such as soliciting potential articles from scholars with whom we already have had meaningful interactions and friendships (as opposed to public calls for articles), integrating poetry and notes from the field with our peer-reviewed articles, offering the blind reviewers who were more junior in their academic careers official letters acknowledging their reviewing contributions for use in their promotion files, to more complex efforts such as carrying out a round of open community peer review, as well as the carrying out of a university symposium for the contributors to further develop their research and to build relationships with all the contributors in this issue.

The symposium entitled ‘Creative Represencing Native American Symposium’ was sponsored and hosted by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame (Feb. 6, 2020), the event included a ‘methods and muffins’ program focused on Native and graduate students wanting to engage in decolonizing research.

Additional efforts were made individually to make this introductory piece accessible and useful. Nearing its final draft, de Leon used this introductory article as a reading for their class on Indigenous and Native American approaches to social justice. One particularly astute senior pointed out that even the conventional double-blind peer review process, central to most academic journals, acts as a technology for breaking the relational model—contributors are kept from knowing reviewers, many of whom pour hours of labor into bettering another scholar’s work. One Native student asked, if settler societies can always change the rules, ‘What is sovereignty?’ Their feeling of dejection, however, was quickly followed by them describing how sovereignty of the soul deeply resonated. This is to point to how Indigenous experiences of sovereignty are both frustrating and hopeful, all while taking place within a system whose aim is to break relationships. Also nearing its final draft, Wildcat worked with a filmmaker with whom he had previously collaborated in his community work with Maskwacis Education Schools Commission. Their goal was to make a teaching- and community-friendly short video as a way to be able to make our work useful and accessible through multiple mediums. Additional efforts related to this issue include the creation of a Creative Sovereignty Lab community apprentice program for the Canadian feature film Tenaya and consulting upon a sovereignty-themed clothing line with the Native-owned company Urban Native Era.

Another defining feature of our editing process is how we carried out peer review. Along with one standard double-blind review, each article also had an open review that enabled a broader and more communal review. In the open review, we created a space where authors were not only challenged to make their writing and analysis sharper, but to also prioritize relationships with community members and other academics working on similar themes. We received feedback from open reviewers about their excitement about the process and their belief that these approaches make academic spaces more humane and uplifting. These reviewers, similar to the double-blind reviewers, made significant investments in each of the author’s works and we are all grateful to Dallas Hunt, Kyle Wilmott, Maria Sonevytsky and Dana Dupris for their generous and productive comments. Though the approach to crafting this special issue may not be entirely unique, we thought it beneficial for readers to be aware of our intention—the creation of spaces for relationships, mentorship, community-involvement, creativity, and for full engagement. We believe the knowledge generated through this issue is dependent on these many levels of relationships.